Vanity Scare Read online

  “I. Um. Well.” Fuck. “We need to see if Osenna really is who she says she is. Just, you know, so we don’t do something completely, totally, and impossibly stupid.”

  “Oh?” She turned to me slowly, and her words came out like snapping turtles. “You think I’m going to do something stupid, Quillan? Something completely totally, and impossibly stupid?”

  Fuck.

  “No, no, absolutely not,” I corrected. “I just, you’re so eager to help people and sometimes you can be a little too… trusting, and I just don’t want something bad to happen to you. Because you’re amazing.”

  I was about to continue rambling, but then I saw her smiling.

  “You’re not stupid, and I didn’t think you were about to do something stupid,” I said. “Not even close. You’re… the opposite of stupid. You’re un-stupid.”

  “Thanks, babe,” she said, opening the door, keys in her hand. Like I hadn’t just said the dumbest sweet thing in the world. Probably for the best, honestly, that really didn’t deserve a fun response. “I need to get some fertilizer. We’ll swing by the garden place around the corner and by the time Patty’s done telling me about her hydrangeas, we’ll have the report back.”

  I followed her out to the driveway. “Hydrangeas?” I repeated, trying to remember who the hell Patty was. Probably whoever owned the garden place around the corner. Christina had mentioned Patty a few times. I think. Maybe. “Wait, hang on. The report?”

  “Yeah.” She opened the door to her Jeep Wrangler and leaned on the frame, waiting for me to get in the other side.

  “What report?”

  “The report Knight will have for us by the time we’re out of the garden place.”

  “What? Wait, when did you—”

  “I texted him the second Osenna said her name.” She smirked at me over her shoulder. “Or were you too busy to notice?”

  I could feel the color in my face. It wasn’t even hot—it was tingly, like I’d been slapped. Self-conscious wasn’t the word. Mortified might be more accurate. “Shut up.”

  She got in the Jeep, making this soft little tutting noise. “Okay, sweetie.”

  I climbed in sheepishly as she closed her door and started the engine.

  “Going back to your point about this being a trap,” she started as she smiled over at me. “It’s Dagan.” She was trying to reassure me, I guess. “He doesn’t care enough to trap anything. Too much work. And anyway, he’s actually really big on consent, so I don’t think a trap is really his thing.” She shrugged.

  “Yeah.” I paused. “Wait. Why do you know he’s big on consent?”

  She adjusted the rearview mirror. She smiled. Said nothing.

  I swallowed. “Hey, Christina, honey, why do you know that?”

  “To the plant store!” she announced, giggling. Like, old-school fairies-in-the-woods-are-trying-to-lure-me-to-my-death giggling. “Onward!”

  ###

  So many bags of dirt. So many.

  We dumped the last of them into the plot in the middle of the backyard around the towering not-strawberry monstrosity that was Timothy. The stalk swayed like grass in a field and there was this weird, deep gurgling noise that sounded like it was coming out of the ground. Like planting Timothy had woken up something ancient and unfriendly deep underneath Splendor. The flowers on his leaves vibrated.

  They looked bigger now.

  “How’s, um, Timothy liking the dirt?” Hades, I sounded like the world’s shittiest drug dealer. Like an undercover cop talking to a bunch of high schoolers about taking “Mary Jane” to the “smoke-zone.”

  Honestly, talking to criminals was easier than talking to plants. Or talking to your girlfriend when she’s talking to a plant that doesn’t seem to like you very much. Timothy probably had a good reason, but I didn’t know what it was. Maybe I’d watered him too much at some point.

  But Christina wasn’t listening to me, anyway. She was patting a really big leaf with garden-gloved hands, smiling and whispering something to Timothy. Rumbly sounds came from the plant and the stem vibrated.

  My phone rang, and I pulled it out of my pocket and answered. I didn’t look at the caller ID; I never do.

  “Quillan,” I said.

  “Christina isn’t answering her phone.”

  I didn’t expect my blood to go cold. But it did. Skating-rink cold, Arctic-glacier-dropping-out-of-the-sky cold. And not because I was dreading talking to him or anything, just…it was Knight.

  Not exactly the guy I wanted to talk to at the moment.

  THREE

  Quillan

  Dulcie and Knight had broken up. Again. For real this time, supposedly. At least, that was what everybody who knew anything had been saying. Whatever had happened was F5-tornado bad, burning-disaster-relief-tent-cities bad. Nobody would tell me what it was, and that was fine—it wasn’t mine to know.

  Sam said even she didn’t know, or at least she didn’t know everything. Which was… weird.

  And I’d never liked Knight to start with. Always had a bad feeling about him.

  Which is really fucking rich, coming from me, but whatever. Takes an ass to know an ass, I guess.

  “What do you got?” I asked, all business.

  There was a tiny pause. Maybe he could feel the coldness coming from me. Or maybe he was just scrolling through paperwork, I didn’t know.

  “I’m responding to Christina’s text,” he answered, giving me the same business tone I’d just given him.

  “Okay.”

  He cleared his throat. “Osenna Warkley is a legal Splendor resident, but according to any and all documents in Splendor and the Netherworld, she’s only existed for the past six years.”

  “Great, of course she has,” I said.

  “She’s got one recorded year of living in the Netherworld, and information from her immigration up to the present, but before that? Nothing. Nothing’s redacted, nothing’s been sealed, there just isn’t anything else to find. For all intents and purposes, it’s like she was born six years ago.”

  “She definitely didn’t have the body of a six-year-old,” I said without realizing what I was saying. Knight just chuckled on the other line, which probably meant he knew what she looked like.

  “Is she here under, like, political asylum or something?” I asked quickly, trying to cover my idiotic comment.

  “No.”

  “Any official name changes?”

  “Nope. And no formal declaration of absent or lost records, either.”

  “So her information isn’t something we lost when the ANC went down?” I asked.

  “No, we had everything backed up, so we didn’t actually lose anything. If she had a birth certificate or anything in the system ever, I’d be able to see it, and there’s nothing here.”

  Fan-fucking-tastic. “Then her name’s definitely not Osenna Warkely.”

  “Probably not. New identity then?”

  “Yeah,” I said. It’s why I’d asked about political asylum in the first place—if we were shielding her from something, it was totally plausible that we just hadn’t been able to access whatever records her old world or country had.

  But it looked more like she’d changed her name—and done a really bad job of it. All the normal paperwork (birth certificate, etc.) would be filed under her birth name, but whatever fuckwit had given her a new identity hadn’t bothered making her an origin story, I guessed. Sloppy work, but six years ago would have been in the middle of the Melchior years, so it honestly didn’t surprise me that she’d skated by with as little documentation as she clearly had.

  “Christina said she was Dagan’s girlfriend?” Knight asked.

  I shrugged, realized Knight couldn’t see me, and directed the gesture to the plant. It rustled a little in my general direction, which was nice. “I don’t know. Christina says she’s Dagan’s something.”

  I chewed on that for a second. Dagan didn’t have many clean friends, in any sense of the word. If Osenna needed to change her
name and smuggle herself out of the Netherworld, Dagan would definitely be on the list of people who could do it. He wouldn’t be able to skip past all the paperwork-y red tape, but he probably knew somebody who could.

  Fuck, if Melchior had been in charge at the time, rushing Osenna’s immigration might have been a favor to somebody down the corporate ladder. “Anything bad on the records we do have?” I asked.

  “Parking tickets and a domestic disturbance, but not really. She hasn’t been arrested for anything.”

  That didn’t mean much. Melchior had never been arrested, either.

  “Anything that proves she and Dagan are actually involved?”

  “Yeah,” Knight answered as the sound of rustling papers ensued. “The domestic disturbance was at his apartment.”

  Okay, well. That proved Dagan and Osenna knew each other, but it didn’t prove they were involved in something longer-term than a single domestic disturbance. “So, final verdict—is she dangerous?”

  “If she’s Dagan’s anything, then yeah, of course she’s dangerous.”

  Shit dog, you right. Anybody who could not only survive Dagan, but actively come back looking for more of that sweet, sweet demon action was either out of options or clinically insane. Or both.

  Probably both.

  “Hey, what’s she on record as?” I asked.

  “Like, physical classification?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Siren.” I didn’t say anything, so he continued. “Why?”

  “No reason,” I said, a little too quickly. Way too quickly. I cleared my throat. “Any chance she’s from the demonic plane? Somebody Dagan brought with him?” The absent paperwork would make more sense then. The demon plane had an iron-curtain policy on sharing records, even and especially for people trying to leave the dimension.

  “Maybe. Demons can come and go whenever, but since she isn’t a demon, then yeah, she’d have to leave via portal or something.”

  “And Osenna isn’t,” I added. “A demon, I mean. Christina checked.” One of the quirks of being a fairy is being able to identify supernatural species. And sure, Knight checked, too, but some part of me really wanted to drive home how not-completely-my-fault all that siren stuff was.

  “Right,” Knight agreed. “Not a demon.”

  “Hang on, wait, I’m an idiot.” I shook my head, wondering where my brain had been. Actually, I knew exactly where it had been. Trying to fight off the call of a siren, something which had royally screwed it up. “Check when Dagan came to Splendor.”

  “Alright, hang on.” Pause. “Uh, ten years ago?”

  Fuck, nevermind.

  “Wait,” he said.

  “Wait, what?”

  “Dagan only went back to the Netherworld twice,” said Knight. “There’s a retroactive report about him taking Sam and Casey’s team to the Netherworld’s Los Angeles, and a formal request for re-entrance… five years ago.”

  “To the Netherworld?” I asked. “From where?”

  “Splendor, California. A week and a half before Osenna came here.” Pause. “They came back on the same day. Within minutes of each other.”

  “Okay, so he definitely brought her with him.”

  “Yeah, no question.” He was quiet then and I could hear him thinking. “Then Osenna’s year living in the Netherworld is probably fake. I bet Dagan had somebody smuggle her out of Dromir and into the Netherworld. Then, he went to the Netherworld to get her.”

  Dromir was the demon plane.

  “And to pay whoever forged everything,” I added. Back then, it would have been way safer to pay somebody in cash on the other side. Melchior wouldn’t have cared, but the ANC in Splendor would have, if we’d found out. “That it?”

  “So far.”

  “Cool, thanks.”

  I wanted to hang up on Knight without saying anything else, so I did. It felt kinda childish, but whatever.

  “Who’s a good boy?” asked Christina. At first, I thought she was talking to me and I was about to respond with an equal amount of flirtation, but then I pouted when I realized she was talking to Timothy. She patted his stem. “Who’s the goodest boy in the whole wide world?”

  Timothy made a soft rumbling noise that probably meant something sideways of “it is me, I am the goodest boy.”

  “Yes, you are,” she cooed. She took off her gardening gloves and turned to me. Dirt was smeared across her face, in little blackish stripes like war paint. Timothy’s shadow swayed back and forth across her.

  “Okay, so Osenna’s just barely real,” I explained.

  “That was Knight?” She pointed to my phone.

  “Yup.”

  She made a face. “Did he sound… okay?” I figured she was referring to the fact that Knight and Dulcie had broken up, and pretty obviously. Like, everyone knew about it, even if we didn’t know the exact reasons why.

  “I mean, yeah, but whatever. The important information is that Osenna isn’t a legal person. All our combined records—okay, is there another word for records? Because I’ve said it like five times in the last ten minutes and it’s starting to sound like a fake word.”

  “Chronicles?” asked Christina. “Accounts? Archives?”

  “Yeah, sure, chronicles.”

  “Okay, so all our combined chronicles?” she encouraged me.

  “All our combined chronicles only have six years of anything for Osenna at all. She lived in the Netherworld for one year, came here legally, and she’s been here since.”

  “Presumably fucking Dagan,” Christina added casually.

  “Gross, but yes,” I said. “At least once; she was part of a domestic disturbance at his apartment.”

  “Violent disturbance?” she asked.

  “I don’t know, I didn’t ask.”

  “Hmm. Okay, maybe she’s scared of Dagan.”

  “Scared?”

  “Yeah, like, if she left something in his apartment and needed to get it, but she was scared he’d be there? Like she tried to break up with him and it didn’t go well.”

  “Why lie about that, though?”

  “I don’t know. Dagan’s lied about dumber things.” She shrugged. “Okay, chronicles. What else you got?”

  “Okay, so before the one year in the Netherworld, we’ve got a whole lot of nothing. No birth certificate, no formal declaration of spontaneous creation, no requests for transformation, nothing. She’s a ghost.”

  “She’s a siren.”

  “Hardy-har, you know what I mean.”

  Christina smiled and sighed. “So, maybe Dagan brought her over with him?”

  “He did,” I answered. “We’re pretty sure he went to the Netherworld to get her. Then he paid somebody to get her out of Dromir, and to also make the two of them new identities before he brought her back here. Which means she’s running from something so dangerous that she had to change her name. Sounds like she could have been running from something like the law.”

  “She could be a fugitive.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “From the law.”

  “Or from somewhere like the demon plane that doesn’t share resources. If she was running from their government, we might have granted her asylum and changed her name without bothering to make up the rest of her paperwork.”

  “Christina, I don’t believe for a second that Dagan and Osenna had to get out of Dromir because they were being persecuted. If they had to leave, it’s because they did something illegal.”

  “Maybe,” she said, shrugging, still on the asylum thing I figured. “Or maybe it was dangerous because Melchior was still in charge at the time.”

  “Or maybe Melchior helped pushed Osenna through because she’s evil and he was evil. Shit, for all we know, Osenna could have been working for Melchior.”

  Christina kissed Timothy’s leaf and it curled around her like it was trying to give her a hug. “Or maybe not.” She grinned and started walking into the house. She tapped my shoulder as she passed me and gave it a little squeeze, like an explosio
n of warmth and niceness. Like if honey was a feeling, you know?

  “I’m gonna get cleaned up and then we’ll head over to Dagan’s, okay?” she asked.

  “Okay.” Pause. Processing. “Wait, what?” I followed her inside. “What do you mean? We’re going over there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Christina, Osenna is lying!”

  Christina went to the sink to wash her hands. “Isn’t everybody?”

  “Chris—”

  “Quill, no matter what is true right now, something is up.” She turned suddenly and her hands were on my arms, gentle and soft and shush-honey-I’m-talking-now. “Right?”

  “…Yes?”

  “Yes, because if she’s lying about Dagan, it means she has a reason to lie about Dagan.”

  “…Yeah?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Look, all we really know right now is that Dagan is missing and somebody important to him is asking for our help. What do we do when somebody asks for our help, Quill?”

  “We help them,” I muttered.

  “Yes. Because that’s our job, right?” She put my phone in my hand. It had been in my pocket before, and I hadn’t felt her take it out.

  “Yes, that’s our job,” I grumbled. Then I glanced down at my phone. “Why did you just hand me this?”

  “Because you’re going to call Casey and let him know where we’re going. Ask for backup if you’re that nervous. And tell him if he hasn’t heard from us by midnight, we’re both probably dead.” She chewed on her cheek for a minute before facing me. “And then ask him if he’ll adopt Timothy.”

  “For fuck’s sake,” I started.

  She took my face in her hands. Small hands, soft hands. Garden-strong, tomato-wrangling hands. She was so warm.

  “Just because somebody lies doesn’t mean they’re evil, Quill,” she pointed out. “You know?”

  The air around Christina always tastes a little sweeter. Like when somebody has one of those waxy plug-in air freshener things. Sometimes it’s soil and grass, sometimes it’s coconut shampoo, sometimes it’s the sweat of a long run. And sometimes it’s just Christina, sweet and warm. Not like cookies, but a smell that makes you feel like you’re smelling cookies. Something safe. Something trustworthy.